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Sunday, 29 November 2015

The Procrastinator (some) Times Sunday 29th of November Edition

Hello dear readers! Happy Sunday, happy almost beginning of December! Let's hope the month ahead and the end of this very dense 2015 is a bit lighter that this terrible November.This is a rather serious edition and we start, of course, with the News: Foreign Policy talks about the importance of saving the Shenghen Zone, a treaty that is under more pressure than ever. The Economist in its article A Continent like Belgium, affirms that the country is politically splintered and vulnerable to terrorism... just as the rest of Europe, because Belgium can be seen as a microcosm of Europe, "first,
in its expression of the dream that domestic differences can be
dissolved in a federalist soup; subsequently as an example of
north-south mistrust. Recent events provide a third prism: like other
European countries, Belgium is floundering in the face of a domestic
terror threat. Here, as elsewhere, budget cuts have left police and
intelligence services short of resources, including Arabic-speakers."

Also, hundreds of thousands of people have marched worldwide to demand action to stop climate change, the day
before a UN summit starts in Paris. And finally, The Economist share some of the newest Venezuelan slang sparked by the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. " After 17 years of "chavismo", the left-wing-ish ideology of the late Hugo Chávez, they have plenty of new material." (I added the -ish to the left-wing, just for the sake of keeping it real, you know).

In Science & Technology, we share TIME's research on the strange new science of floating. Scientists like the neuropsychologist Justin Feinstein believes floating could be a shortcut for many people to reach a
meditative state, and reap some of its proven benefits. The Atlantic on the other hand teach us How not to die of botulism. "Highly-poisonous botulinum toxin (the stuff in Botox), played a
formidable role in the history of food and warfare. It is still a factor
in prison-brewed alcohol and some canned foods, and can quickly kill a
person."